MARION COUNTY, Fla. — Fordham Early Learning Academy Principal Jennifer Beck watched proudly as a line of three-year-olds quietly exited the playground, received a squirt of hand sanitizer, and filed into their classroom for lunch.
She remarked on the quality of the class’s teachers as she led a tour of the recently opened magnet school, which is designed to give Marion County’s youngest pupils more specialized attention and a head start in their education careers.
As the district’s director of early learning, Beck is trying to grow programs like this to boost the district’s success in later grades. However, she and other administrators are growing frustrated at a rising trend: a “fair number” of kindergarteners show up without basic life skills.
“We had kids that didn’t even know their given name,” School Board Member Nancy Thrower complained during the district’s Sept. 4 meeting. “We have kids that don’t know how to hold a book, kids that haven’t been potty trained yet, and they’re six years old.”
The problem isn’t limited to Marion, but leaders there try to be aggressive about their concerns. The school board sent state lawmakers a series of recommendations, including lowering the mandatory school age to five years old and tightening the number of unexcused absences a child can get before a district gets involved.
“Kindergarten is not daycare,” Beck said. “We expect kindergarten kindergarteners to come to school, to attend daily, to get all of the information and to learn all that they can.”
Beck explained that kindergarten has shifted since she first stepped into the classroom 30 years ago. Back then, she said, she considered it a success if each of her students moved onto first grade knowing how to identify numbers and letters, use scissors and tie their shoes.
Each of those skills is now expected to be learned in preschool, before students enter kindergarten.
She said that shift has led to a wider gap between students who come to school prepared and those who don’t.
“Students who participate in in something prior to entering kindergarten, they come in more times than not more prepared than students who have not had access or opportunity to that,” Beck said. “I really firmly believe it’s critical that they participate in something, and I think our community offers a variety of things that students and families can get involved in prior to before they ever even walk in the door kindergarten.”
At the Marion County Public Library headquarters in Ocala Thursday afternoon, young children were buzzing around the shelves, looking for superheroes in a scavenger hunt and collecting stickers as rewards. Signs advertised story times and other programs Beck said are needed to get kids interacting with each other, talking and reading.
The issue isn’t necessarily translating into test scores. Kindergarteners scored higher on readiness tests last year than they did in 2022 – though those tests measured different skill sets.
Beck blamed the rise in iPad and technology use among young children for the increase in kids who don’t know the basics on the social end.
“Students and children need to be talking to each other,” she said. “They need to be talking to their families. They need to be playing inside and outside. That’s where so many things are taught, is through language and conversation.”
She admitted many parents find it easier to occupy their kids’ attention at places like restaurants with a screen to keep them calmer and quieter – but she said those were the situations where engaging with the child could made a difference.
“Where they are at, what they are eating, what foods they like and don’t like, what family members are around the table,” she suggested. “We’ve got to get back to some of those basics again.”
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